Topic: Market Insight

By Fred Evans – June 4, 2018

Two Sundays ago, I stopped in at a local convenience store and noticed the television was tuned to a Canadian all-news station.

The last provincial leaders’ debate had just ended and I asked the young clerk how it had gone. Her reply was that she had not paid attention to it but “as long as Ford did not win the election she would be happy.”

“Ford is just like Trump,” and we can’t have that in Ontario, she told me.

By Fred Evans – March 21, 2018

“What is cheap (undervalued) that I can buy that is going to go up so that I can make some money?”

That was the standard refrain I heard when I would receive inquiries from neophyte investors (speculators) interested in trading commodity futures. In my twenty years as a commodity futures account executive I never received a single phone call from a potential client who asked “what is overvalued that I can sell short and make some money?”

A young grain producer and I were recently speaking about marketing and he expressed frustration in his quest to do a good job at pricing his crops. While he does an excellent job of producing his crops on the 1,000+ acres he farms, he feels out of his league when he ventures into the world of grain marketing at the CME. I acknowledged his concerns and encouraged him to keep learning as much as he could about marketing, and to practice a degree of patience.

I explained to this producer that achieving a level of comfort and success with marketing often takes years.